Saints: Ballpark seating won’t be sacrificed

Officials say they won’t reduce seating to deal with a higher-than-expected budget for the new St. Paul Saints ballpark. The stadium is still scheduled to open in 2015. (Submitted rendering: Ryan Cos. US)

A day after saying that the cost of the new St. Paul Saints ballpark has shot up from $54 million to nearly $63 million because of contaminated soils and other challenges, the project team insists it won’t skimp on seating to cover the costs.

Plans still call for a 7,000-seat stadium on the polluted 11-acre property currently occupied by the Diamond Products building, at Broadway and Fifth streets in the Lowertown area of downtown St. Paul.

“There have been a lot of creative ideas on how to value-engineer the project to save on costs, but we’ve said publicly from day one that we will be building a ballpark that can service a Double-A baseball team,” a goal that would not be met by reducing the number of seats, city Parks and Recreation spokesman Brad Meyer said in an email.

Tom Whaley, executive vice president of the Saints, said Thursday that the ballclub has “never really looked at an option” that would include fewer than 7,000 seats, which is slightly more than the existing capacity at Midway Stadium, the team’s current home.

Meanwhile, the Saints and the city are “making good progress” on a lease agreement and are “probably three-fourths of the way there,” according to Whaley. Meyer said the negotiations are “still ongoing.” The length of the lease is part of those negotiations, Meyer said.

By comparison, the Minnesota Vikings agreed to sign a 30-year lease in their new stadium as part of the stadium legislation. But details of the “use agreement” are still being worked out with the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority, according to Vikings spokesman Jeff Anderson.

St. Paul Parks and Recreation Director Mike Hahm said Wednesday that the project team needs another $2.6 million to build a ballpark that would meet the 7,000-seat “vision” and another $6.2 million to deal with contaminated soil and site work.

The project team is “pursuing a combination of public and private funds” to address the funding gap, Hahm said, and it is asking the Saints to “increase their contribution to the project.”

Existing funding sources include $25 million in bonding from the state, $17 million from the city, $10 million from the Saints and $2 million in cleanup grants from government agencies.

Whaley said construction inflation is partly to blame for the additional $2.6 million needed. The worse-than-expected soil also plays into that because it affects the design, he said.

“The soil, in addition to being its own beast, is affecting everything about what we are doing,” Whaley said.

A look at two ballparks

Compared with other similar-sized ballpark projects in the works or recently completed in the nation, the Lowertown project appears to be on the expensive end, although the other projects may not be dealing with the same site complexities.

In Biloxi, Miss., for example, the city is contemplating a 7,000-seat stadium for a Class AA minor league baseball team. The budget for that project is $35 million on a site that’s good to go.

Like the city of St. Paul, Biloxi is touting the project as an economic development magnet that could host a variety of events. Biloxi spokesman Vincent Creel says the ballpark could draw 300,000 people to the area every year.

Biloxi is looking to start construction this year if plans fall into place and then finish in time for the 2014 season — an aggressive construction schedule, even for an area that doesn’t have harsh winters.

“It’s on a fast track right now and there are a few people saying, ‘How fast is this track? Do we want to slow it down?’… The biggest thing is, we are excited about what the economic development opportunities are,” Creel said.

“We have nonunion labor, so that makes it much more affordable down here than if they were building up north,” Bennett said.

About three years ago, the Harrisburg Senators, an Eastern League affiliate of the Washington Nationals, completed a $45 million upgrade to the team’s 6,100-seat stadium in Harrisburg, Pa.

The project was about 90 percent new construction and 10 percent renovation, according to Terry Byrom, media relations director for the Senators. It updated a ballpark that was built in 1987.

“Very little was done to make things better for the players,” Byrom said. “For the most part everything that was changed was to make it a better facility for people to watch a game.”

Will the fans follow?

The city of St. Paul projects that the new Saints ballpark will draw 400,000 fans per year to the Lowertown area, but not everyone agrees with those projections.

Peter Boehm, a season ticket holder for 21 years, said the Saints have a base of about 1,500 loyal fans — people who come to the games on a regular basis, endure rain delays and stay “through extra innings to the bitter end.”

He doesn’t think those diehards will follow the team en masse to Lowertown.

“The people who go to those Lowertown bars are young urban hipsters,” said Boehm, who wanted the Saints to continue playing at Midway. “They like to go out, have cocktails, listen to music with their friends. … They are nice people and it’s a good crowd, but they are not baseball fans.

“Somehow the Saints have gotten the idea that if they move downtown it will become their fan base,” he said. “Those of us who have gone to Saints games all these years don’t think that’s true.”

Whaley said he’s confident that the fans will show up in Lowertown.

“There is a lot of magic that happens at Midway Stadium. We believe that 100 percent of that has to do with the people and not the place. … Our sense is that the fans are not going to go away,” Whaley said.

Meyer said the new downtown site will have more to offer for visitors.

“If fans of the Saints are willing to travel to an area at Midway that has little to do beyond going to an old and run-down stadium, we fully expect they would be willing to travel to a bustling and vibrant Lowertown,” he said in an email.

Demolition of the Diamond Products building is expected to start this month. Minneapolis-based Ryan Cos. US is the design-builder for the ballpark, which is scheduled to open in time for the 2015 minor league baseball season.

One comment

I retired as a professor of management from Western Illinois University and relocated to Lowertown. Prior to my career in academe, I was a project manager for two large companies, one in Illinois and one in Iowa. I am very familiar with cost benefit analysis as a practitioner and teacher. I analyzed the DEED application submitted for the construction of the ballpark and found the claimed benefits very suspect. I submitted a commentary to the Star Tribune and it was published on Saturday May 17, 2013. You may want to look at it.http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/207943651.html